Alone in the Ashes (8 page)

“Fasten your seat belt, Jordy!” Ben yelled.

“My what?” Jordy yelled over the roaring of the engine.

“Forget it, boy. Just hang on.”

The road appeared just in front of them, but a deep ditch was between them and blacktop. Ben raced along, the road to their right until he found a place where he could try. He spun the wheel, goosed the engine, and they were across, the rear tires on rutted blacktop. Ben slipped the truck out of four-wheel drive. At the junction of Highway 2, Ben cut north, driving as fast as he dared until intersecting with Highway 266 and Interstate 40. He elected to stay with 266, turning west once more.

“The bastards got away!” the CB squawked. “But I got ‘em in sight. They're on 266 headin' west.”

“Keep them in sight. We're about fifteen minutes behind you.”

“We have to make a stand someplace, Jordy. And this interchange right up here looks just dandy for it.”

“What are you goin' do, Ben?”

“I'm going to ambush them, boy.” He turned off 266 and tucked the truck behind an old service station. Ben grabbed his rocket launcher, told Jordy to grab a couple of rockets, and took his M-16 and sniper rifle, draping a bandoleer of ammo over his shoulder for both weapons. Jordy stuffed his jacket pockets with hand grenades without being told. Ben grinned at the boy.

They both were panting when they reached the top of the overpass.

Ben hurriedly loaded the RPG, checked to see that Jordy was out of the way of the backblast, which could be lethal, and sighted in the lead truck that had been following them.

Ben sighted in the truck at six hundred meters, but he knew he had to hold his fire until they were within three hundred meters, maximum. There was a slight wind blowing, and firing the RPG would be tricky, since the finned rocket grenade could be thrown off course by a crosswind. Several of Ben's Rebels, unfamiliar with the RPG, had found this out the hard way.

Ben triggered the round and the truck exploded in a ball of flames. The explosion literally tore the truck from its wheels, leaving the smoking frame, with its melted tires, welded to the concrete.

“Holy shit!” Jordy said.

“I'll agree with that, too, Jordy,” Ben said. He looked at the slender boy. “Can you fire a rifle, Jordy?”

“Yes, sir. That warlord that grabbed me? All his men had M-16's. I know how to work them.”

“Well, get ready, son. 'Cause here they come.”

The chase vehicles were on the interstate, paralleling 266. Ben smiled, for the first time thinking he and the boy might get out of this box without too much trouble.

The vehicles were coming at them in a knot, all bunched up, and rolling very fast. Ben sighted in the RPG, tracked the lead vehicle, a king-cab truck, through the range-finder, and triggered off a rocket.

The rocket struck the truck dead center, the aftereffects turning the interstate into a flaming hell for those in the vehicles behind the truck. They could not brake in time and a monumental pile-up was created. Ben reloaded and fired, adding more burning hell to the confusion and death below them.

Jordy's M-16 began barking, the boy coolly firing the weapon, picking his targets and hitting them a good two out of three times.

Ben picked up his .30-06 and joined the boy, with Jordy taking the left side of the interstate, Ben the right side.

More vehicles began exploding as the flames reached the gas tanks. Men and women began running from the wreckage, human torches screaming as flesh cooked and sizzled.

“Back to the truck, Jordy,” Ben called. “Now's the time to split.”

The man and the boy ran for safety as black smoke poured into the sky. They roared off down the interstate, leaving behind them the foul stench of burning human bodies and the howling of the soon-to-be dead.

If there were any survivors in Henryetta, Oklahoma, Ben didn't stop to check them out. He stayed on the interstate all the way to the junction of Highway 99, and there cut south. Ben began to breathe a little bit easier when they crossed the Canadian River. He bypassed Ada and turned west on 19, staying on that highway until they were halfway between Pauls Valley and Chickasha. At a clump of trees by the Washita River, Ben cut off the highway.

“We'll spend the night here, Jordy. I think we deserve a good hot meal and some rest, don't you?”

“Yes, sir,” the boy replied. “But I got to change clothes first.”

“What's the matter? Your clothes don't look that dirty.”

The boy blushed. “I peed my pants back there, Ben.”

 

 

Putting together bits and pieces of information gathered along the way, plus the reports from their scouts that had fanned out north, south, and west, Jake and West tracked Ben's movements. But they were always three to four days behind.

Jake Campo stood looking at the ashes of a campfire for a moment. Then he checked the tire tracks left in the earth.

“He picked up company,” West said, hobbling up on his crutch. “Got him a woman.”

“I don't think so,” Jake said. “More like a small kid. Some underwear over there in the bushes. Boy's drawers.” He was thoughtful for a moment. “That's good, West. Goddamn punk will slow him down. He'll be worryin' about the boy; might drop his guard.”

“The man who kills Ben Raines,” West mused aloud, “will be able to just about write his own ticket. You know that, Jake?”

“Yeah, West. I know it. Or the
men
who kill him.”

“That's what I meant, Jake.”

“Uh-huh,” Campo said. Campo was an outlaw, and a man with few principles. But West was even worse than Jake. Jake knew the man had put his own sister into a whorehouse back in '95. Low was low, but that was the pits.

Have to watch West, Campo concluded.

Jake Campo was a no-good bastard, West was thinking. Would shoot a man in the back if given half a chance. Jake had teamed up with men over the past. His partners always met a very bad end. Son of a bitch was just no good. Killed his best friend, West recalled. Back in ‘97 or '98.

Have to keep an eye on Jake, West concluded.

“Somehow I got it in my mind Raines was headin' to Texas,” Jake was speaking. “He ought to be cuttin' southwest; but he ain't. What the hell is the man up to?”

“Scouts callin' in, Jake!” a man shouted.

Jake took the mike. “Yeah?”

“Big shoot out just west of Siloam Springs, Jake,” the scout reported. “Man and a kid in a fancy, duded-up pickup truck raised hell at a local roadblock. Scouts south of us reported a lot of smoke and flames around Eufaula Lake.”

“Ten-four. Keep on his tail and call in every day. Jake out.”

“Now the bastard is headin' southwest,” Jake said with a smile. “Roll 'em, boys! Let's go get Ben Raines.”

 

 

She couldn't let the children know it, but she was scared—plenty scared. Her old bus had broken down and she didn't know Jack-shit about fixing engines.

She crouched in the old warehouse in Lubbock, Texas, and looked at the kids. An even dozen. The youngest was three, the oldest, twelve. She had started out from north Oklahoma with fifteen. One had died of something along the way. She never had known what it was, except that the boy had coughed a lot and had finally began spitting up blood and running a very high fever. He had died ten hours later. They'd gotten caught in a storm between Dalhart and Interstate 40. That's when the little girl had wandered off.

Hadn't turned my back for more than a minute, Rani thought. And the kid was gone. Just like that. Called and called. But she couldn't leave the others to go and look. She had thought there were no more tears left in her. But she'd found more when she had to drive off after waiting a full twenty-four hours.

Then in Amarillo she'd lost the oldest girl to those goddamned outlaws. And the human filth had wanted the young boys, too. Perverted bastards. Somehow she had managed to elude them, the rattletrap old bus on its last legs. Just south of New Deal, the old bus had finally given up the ghost. She and the kids had walked to the outskirts of Lubbock, seeking shelter at the old Lubbock International Airport. There was a bob truck behind some crates in the building next to where she'd hidden the kids. The empty crates looked like they'd been deliberately placed around the truck, but a long time back. She had replaced the battery—she knew how to do that much—and she'd found some drums of what she hoped was gasoline, carefully hidden in the far side of the warehouse, or whatever the hell this building used to be. In the morning, she'd prime the carburetor and try to start the damn thing. She knew she had to get south for the winter. The kids already had colds, and without any medication at all, she'd have cases of pneumonia on her hands.

And there was the not-so-small matter of that goddamned self-proclaimed warlord who called himself Vic.

Crazy Vic.

And his men were just as nutty. She thought they were all escapees from a nuthouse.

She had started her little orphanage up in north Oklahoma, taking in wandering kids. Some stayed with her, though most had left, the lure and pull of the road having been all they'd ever known. She'd worked very hard on her little wayside home for kids. And at one time she'd had almost forty kids to care for. She loved doing it.

Then Vic and his men had arrived.

They had taken her guns, and then raped her. Vic had told her if she didn't become his woman, he'd pass the kids around to his men and Rani could damn well have what was left of them after his boys got done butt-fucking them.

Rani had endured Vic's perversions for a week, until she got her chance to escape. Most of the kids had already run off.

Now she had Crazy Vic and his bunch following her.

But she also had a pistol and a rifle she'd found in a house along the way, and lots of ammunition. And Rani was a good shot.

If that truck will just start, she thought, we might make it.

If.

 

 

“Crossing into Texas, Jordy.”

“I never been so far, Ben. But I sure am glad we got away from them outlaws.”

“You running out of underwear?” Ben kidded him.

Jordy blushed.

The pair had stayed not one night, but four nights, camped along the river. The weather had abated, actually turning rather warm. They fished, rested, and Ben told the boy stories of how it used to be, back when the Tri-States had been in operation.

“You really mean nobody went hungry and you wasn't always scared somebody was goin' to get you?” the boy asked.

“Nobody went hungry, Jordy. Not if we knew about it. And no, you didn't have to be scared. We didn't have crime in Tri-States, Jordy. The cost to the criminal was just too high. Besides, everybody that wanted to work, could work. There was no need to steal.”

“That must have been a nice place to live,” Jordy said wistfully.

“Oh, it was, if a person obeyed the law and respected the rights of others.”

“What happened if they didn't?”

“There was somebody around to bury them.”

Ben and Jordy had rambled around on county roads, picking up Highway 62 at Lawton and taking that into Texas. They turned south and headed for Childress, crossing the Red River.

This was an area of the once-proud-and-mighty nation the rats had hit hard. Ben had not expected to see many survivors, but he hadn't thought it would be this bad.

There just wasn't anybody.

Or anything.

“What happened around here, Ben?” Jordy asked. “There ain't a godda ... darn thing alive.”

“Rats, Jordy. For some reason—and I don't know why—the rats hit this part of the country hard. Very few people made it out alive.”

The boy looked nervously around him. “We ain't stoppin', are we, Ben?”

“Not even to pee, Jordy.”

At Paducah, Texas, Ben spotted the first human being he'd seen in a hundred miles of absolute desolation.

He pulled off the highway and drove slowly up to the small group of people. Ben let a white handkerchief flutter from his left hand, held out the window.

Ben called, “We're friendly, folks.”

A man smiled and waved at him. “Then come on out and sit and talk, friend.”

“The last hundred miles looked a little grim,” Ben said, accepting a cup of coffee—or what presently passed for coffee.

“To say the least,” a woman said. “The rats have been long gone, died out, but everybody in that area was killed. We try to stay out of that part of the country.”

“What's your name, friend?” a cowboy asked.

Jordy grinned.

“Ben Raines.”

The knot of people grew still and silent. The man who had first waved and spoken to Ben shuffled his booted feet.
“General
Ben Raines?”

“Yes. But why don't we just keep it Ben?”

“Mr. Raines,” a woman stepped forward, “you like stew?”

“I sure do, ma'am.”

“Then let's eat.”

 

 

Rani looked at the body of the man she'd just shot through the head. She recognized him as one of Crazy Vic's men. And she knew Vic and the rest of his gang would not be far behind.

“Robert, Kathy!” she called to the two oldest of her adopted brood. “Help me drag this body over there and hide it.”

She gave Robert, twelve years old, the man's pistol, and Kathy, also twelve, the man's rifle. Rani was working so fast she wasn't thinking properly.

“Rani?” Kathy said. “This man had to get here someway. He sure didn't fly. He probably hid his car or truck.”

Rani gently ruffled the girl's hair. “Good thinking, Kathy. Pray it's a truck.”

It was a king-cab pickup. And best of all, the pickup started at the first touch of the ignition. Rani put her forehead on the steering wheel and said a little prayer.

“Prayin' ain't gonna help none, cunt!” the man's voice said.

Rani raised her head and looked into the mean eyes of a man.

“You kill Harry?” the man asked.

Rani nodded her head.

The man grinned. His teeth were no more than blackened stumps. “Didn't lak him noway. Git outta the truck, bitch, and take me to that fine-lookin' little big girl travelin' with you. I want me a taste of young pussy. Then I'll get to you.”

The man's entire lower jaw disappeared in a roaring boom and gush of blood and bone. He was flung to one side, the blood from his wound staining the concrete floor.

Rani, temporarily deafened by the gunshot, looked around. Kathy was standing by the rear of the pickup, the .30-30 rifle in her hands. She had shot the man from a distance of no more than six or seven feet.

The man flopped on the floor, his boot heels drumming in agony. He tried to speak. Only horrible bubbling sounds came from his ruined face.

In normal times, the child would have probably been sick after what she'd done. But these were not normal times.
Normal times
would probably never come again. At least not in her lifetime. Kathy looked at the jerking, bleeding man.

“Get his guns and bullets, Miss Rani,” she said. “We got to stay ready for Vic when he comes. And you know he'll be comin' after us.”

“Yes,” Rani came out of her fog of shock. She took several deep breaths, calming herself. The kids had gathered around. God! she thought. What a pitiful looking crew. Her eyes touched Robert. “Robert, you find all the gas cans you can round up, start filling them with gas from those drums.” She looked at eleven-year-old Jane, pale and too thin, always susceptible to colds. “You help Robert, honey.”

“Yes, ma'am.” The kids scurried off.

Sarah and Becky, the three-year-olds, stood off to one side, eyes big as they looked at the dying man on the concrete. “Lisa,” Rani said. “You look after Sarah and Becky. Come on, kids, we've got to get busy.”

“Is Crazy Vic gonna get us, Rani?” Six-year-old Danny asked.